Reviewing and comparing common systems for assessing neighborhood sustainability

Many communities, mainly in the developed world, use neighborhood sustainability assessment programs and systems to measure their success near proximity to sustainable development goals. The characteristics and success of these systems in covering the various dimensions of sustainability is an issue that should be considered by urban planners and designers. In this research, to recognize and identify the limitations and capabilities of the neighborhood sustainability assessment systems; four known systems in this field, namely LEED-ND, BREEAM-Communities, CASBEE-UD, and DGNB-NSQ, have been critically reviewed.

In this research, with a broad review of texts and a comparative study of four neighborhood sustainability assessment systems, using content analysis method to issues such as comparing structure and classification, the weight of topics and criteria, the amount of sustainability coverage and so on have been addressed. After comparing the general comparison of neighborhood sustainability assessment systems, a comparative framework based on four dimensions of urban sustainable development has been created in the form of 8 issues.

Despite observing the treelike structure in the systems, differences in the importance of the subjects and the degree of sustainability coverage are noticeable. Studies have shown that more than 68% of the evaluation criteria emphasize the environmental dimension and the two issues of land use-urban context-building layout with more than 20% and resources (energy, water, materials) with more than 13%, were recognized as important and influential subjects in the process of evaluating neighborhoods. However, the approach of systems has been different on other issues.

The results showed that the systems under study, despite providing useful operational methods to assess sustainability due to excessive focus on the environmental dimension and the same neglect of other dimensions of sustainability, have not been effective in assessing the sustainability of neighborhoods as a whole And they need more maturity.